9/11 Commission whitewash chief Thomas Kean told CNN yesterday that the Christmas Day plane bomber “did us a favor,” by allowing Obama to expand the so-called war on terror into Yemen, a startling reminder that the highly suspicious Flight 253 attack served to fulfil pre-determined U.S. geopolitical objectives.

“This guy in some respects looking at it in retrospective probably did us a favor,” Kean told CNN’s State of the Union Sunday talk show, adding that the attempted attack shifted the Obama administration’s attention away from health care and global warming and back to the war on terror.

“We weren’t really focused on Yemen and the terrible things that are happening there. Now we are and that’s a good thing,” said Kean.

“The GOP chairman’s quote raised eyebrows; by his logic, the Sept. 11, 2001 attackers may also have “done us a favor” by drawing US attention to extremism in Afghanistan,” writes Raw Story’s John Byrne[2].

However, Kean’s implication that Yemen was not a subject of U.S. geopolitical interest before the attempted attack drew attention to the country is completely at odds with the facts.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

A December 24 BBC News report entitled Yemen: New frontier in US ‘war on terror’ [3]revealed how the U.S. had already invested $70 million dollars over the last year on expanding the war on terror into Yemen and that “US intelligence agencies are keeping a closer and closer watch in this newly-emerging theatre in the “war on terror”.”

A week after the incident, President Obama pinned the blame for the attack on terrorists based in Yemen despite the fact that no formal investigation into the bombing had been concluded.

Obama’s statement came one day after Britain’s PM Gordon Brown called an “emergency summit” on “extremism” in Yemen. “Gordon Brown has invited key international partners to a high-level meeting in order to discuss how best to counter radicalization in Yemen,” a statement issued by Downing Street announced. “The prime minister will host the event on 28 January in London.”

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[4]

The fact that the aborted plane bombing attack provided the perfect justification to expand U.S. military operations into Arabian Peninsula in the name of fighting Al-Qaeda makes the suspicious circumstances surrounding the December 25 incident all the more alarming.

As we have documented[5], The FBI has repeatedly changed its story in a haphazard effort to accommodate eyewitness testimony from passengers that conflicts with the official version of events.

At first the FBI denied that a second man was arrested in connection with the incident but later admitted a second man was handcuffed after Flight 253 passenger and eyewitness Kurt Haskell said he saw an Indian man being led away by authorities after sniffer dogs had found something in his luggage.

Officials then claimed that the man had not been on Flight 253 at all and was not connected with the incident, but had to reverse their statement again [6]just days later when other eyewitnesses emerged, admitting that the man had been on the plane.

The fact that the FBI is apparently protecting accomplices involved with the bombing attempt, and thereby keeping the official story within the script necessary to pin the attack on a lone man from Yemen who was inspired by Al-Qaeda, blatantly suggests that the facts are being manipulated to fit a pre-conceived geopolitical agenda.